Amika Mobile Blog

Emergency Alerting and Citizen Advisories continue to be very important in today’s world of live shooters, natural disasters like hurricanes as well as unusual occurrences like outbreaks of viruses that quickly get labeled as pandemics. Here is a 10 point checklist to consider when evaluating such solutions: 

1.How fast can an alert be sent and received at full load?Often, delays in sending out and receiving alerts put lives at risk. In December a live shooter was at Virginia tech again and their SMS solution was used to send out the emergency alerts. SMS alerts were still being received 6 days later. The alerts went out instantly but were not received.  

 2.Who can send the alert?Emergency alerting and advisories are typically sent by the persons with the authority to do so. It is essential to have more than 1 person authorized to do so in case the 1 individual who should send the alert cannot.  

3.Can an alert be sent remotely?An emergency in a building or at a facility may force individuals who are required to send the alerts to activate them remotely.  Does the solution in question support this? 

4.Can system notify masses quickly?An emergency alerting system may reach some of the population as registered in a database but not all. It is essential to ensure that multiple pathways can reach individuals in an emergency. This is why solution that provide broadcast alerts without user addressing information are better at reaching the masses.  

5.Can several alerting pathways be used? Some solutions support 1 or 2 methods such as SMS or email for example. It is essential to pick a solution that can support multiple pathways such as WiFi broadcasts, SMS, Email or Voice.  

6.Does system require /support self-registration? Can it broadcast?Most solutions require users to be registered in a database. Very often users do not want to self-register and some system support LDAP integration for getting user names, email addresses and phone numbers. Rare systems support broadcasts over WiFi hotspots and avoid self registration altogether.  

7.Is system redundant and fault tolerant?What occurs when the power fails? Does the system continue working or fail? If an unexpected event occurs with system software, does the solution fail? 

8.Can system target sub-groups:  geographic, zip code, building?Many systems alert or broadcast to entire lists without supporting sub-groups or partial lists. This is important when 1 out of 30 buildings on a campus is affected or 1 floor out of a tower has to be evacuated quickly.  

9.Can system support 2-way so that people can be tracked?In a live shooter situation, it is very important to get as much tactical information for the first responders as possible. Rare systems support 2-way communication or a back channel to command central that provides valuable information about the movement of individuals in an emergency.  

10.Can system be hacked? Is it secure and supports authentication? Authentication and secure access for sending out alerts is also a key feature for solutions that alert. Spammers and hackers would love to get access to these solutions.   …Sue Abu-Hakima, CEO Amika Mobile.

It seems that campus shootings and emergencies continue to occur. The US govt has mandated that all educational institutions including schools, colleges and universities put in place emergency notification procedures to avoid such tragedies as Virginia Tech, and Illinois. In the case of Virginia Tech, an email was sent immediately after the first shooting in the dorm and that email took 2 hours to reach its intended recipients - within those 2 hours, another 31 students were killed. Here are 5 rules of thumb to consider as you are implementing a mass emergency notification plan for your campus:

#1 Have an Emergency Plan & Team - Every campus should have a multi-disciplinary team responsible for the first notifications to the campus population and reaching first responders (police, EMS, fire, etc.). This team must put together a plan for emergencies such as fire in a lab or to deal with a hostile shooter or other threat. This plan must be reviewed and owned by the administration of the academic institution (be it Principal, President, etc.), the students, the faculty and operations personnel.

#2 Leverage Existing Infrastructure at the College/University - WiFi / Email / Voice - Campuses have WiFi networks, Email and Voice networks. These can be leveraged to deliver emergency alerts to the campus population in the first few minutes of an emergency. These will likely save people’s lives.

#3 Have multiple Emergency Alerting Pathways - WiFi / Email / SMS/ Voice - As per practice #2 - campuses spend millions of dollars on infrastructure. Many vendors will work with existing networks and all possible alerting pathways should be leveraged. Indeed Virginia Tech now has 4 methods of alerting including SMS, Email, Voice, Loud Speaker and Whiteboard monitors.

#4 Run through Emergency Exercises to Ensure Campus Population is Aware of Plan - It is difficult to have a plan that is unpracticed. In an effort to avoid disruption to student and faculty, many campuses do not run drills. This is a mistake as “practice makes perfect”. Every term should include a drill of the emergency notification system of the campus.

#5 Review Emergency Plan with local Emergency Forces - Police / EMS / Fire - Finally, the first responders in an emergency will be police, EMS and fire personnel. It is important that they be aware of the campus plan in case of an emergency and any vital early information that they may need to mitigate the risk to students and faculty be collected through the emergency team.

 …Sue Abu-Hakima, CEO Amika Mobile.

Many school districts are asking for emergency alerting solutions to mobile phones and traditional phones. One area they seem to be completely ignoring is alerting over WiFi. What if the student or faculty member is in the basement of a school or College on headphones and on an Internet laptop when an emergency alert comes in? This is why alerting at HotSpots or over the WiFi is so critical as well. This is why Amika Mobile was chosen for a Mobile Village Award since we are the first to have achieved something that helps our community. ….Sue

Another show has come and gone - take a look at the  Cnet slide show . Many companies milling about with all sorts of mobile apps and even cooler names.  Again this year the major handset vendors  tried to outdo each other. Samsung’s Instinct captured a lot of attention. Of course, we introduced the first WiFi & SMS Emergency Alerting solution in partnership with Meru Networks. This is useful for broadcasting an amber alert with a picture of the child at a mall or anywhere there is a hot spot. It was great to get the ‘Wow’ reaction from people who thought it only possible to alert over SMS! Fun moments at the show also included the Motorola Star Wars Storm Troopers. We also gave away a couple of 3G iPhones and got a frenzy around the booth.  ….Sue Abu-Hakima

Recently I was asked about the difference between Meemo and AmikaMobile.net. Meemo is dedicated to enabling smartphones to view emails with a pull down client. The problem comes in if you do not have a Smartphone such as a Blckberry or iPhone etc. I was also asked about Teleflip which pushes email to SMS through an SMC. Teleflip does not summarize the email as amikamobile does, it forwards the packets on. But it was very interesting to see at geek.com that the Teleflip site was brought down recently due to lack of funds. They had been trying the advertising model and were not successful in bringing the carriers onboard …Sue Abu-Hakima 

Those of you observing Canada have been treated to a great lesson in bad marketing and PR by Telus and Bell. Both announced last week that they would charge users for incoming SMS messages. So, anytime you txt a friend off your mobile and they get the message, they are charged! The reason they did this negative marketing announcement is to force their users to subscribe to an SMS bundle that they charge anywhere from $3, $5 or even as much as $15 for a month. There has been such an uproar that the carriers are now having to answer to the licensing bodies and the consumer groups on this. This in the middle of a wireless auction as more policy is decided. This is a great case study for years to come for business students for what not to do in business as consumers are swearing off the carriers in droves! Bad for business, isn’t it! Enough said…Sue Abu-Hakima

Blogs have been actively debating the pricing plans for the iPhone. Luckily enough pressure was exerted onto Rogers to change the plan from $100/month or $1200/year to $30/month. This pricing is more in line with other SmartPhone offerings from Rogers. Note the fine print however as this plan expires August 11/2008 and it requires a 3 year service contract. It will be interesting to see the uptake over the next few months! Bloggers still think the AT&T plans are more in favour of the consumer though… www.itinfusion.ca/recommended/rogers-versus-att-an-apples-to-apples-iphone-3g-pricing-comparison/  Enough said….Sue Abu-Hakima

The blogs are buzzing with the latest prediction that Apple will sell 45 Million iPhones by 2009! Note that in 2007, all smartphone vendors combined sold only 38 Million units. So, how is Apple going to pull this off? According to popular blogging, they will do this by introducing next generation devices. Some bloggers are going even further and predicting the demise of the Blackberry in the face of such a conquest by the iPhone. So, what do I think? I think that the iPhone and the Blackberry will indeed continue to fight for Smartphone market share. At the same time the good old vanilla phone of which 1 Billion units were sold in 2007 according to IDC to place 3.3 Billion in use will continue to dominate the market. This is why applications like ours that can intelligently analyze content and take it down to the 2×2 inch micro screen especially for killer apps like Email-to-SMS will be very important. Our applications act as Context Firewalls^TM for these devices to make sure only the relevant and most useful content is pushed to the mobile not whatever and whoever wants to spam your Inbox gets you.  Enough said. …Sue Abu-Hakima

So, CTIA 2008 has come and gone in Las Vegas. From a mechanical bull, a Fashion show at the Alcatel Booth, a pink eerie statue at the Sony Ericsson booth, pretty in purple at the Samsung booth and both Iron Man and a Dick Tracy mobile phone watch from LG - it sounds like the gimmicks were in full force. So, what is next for mobility? My bet is on smarter applications for mobile phones that deliver information that you need rather than pushing everything to your mobile gadget. I have started speaking about the need for Context Firewalls(TM)  for mobility so that you get interrupted in certain contexts only when you need to be interrupted. This will release mobile phone users from the leash of being on and interruptible and hence stressed 24×7. …Sue Abu-Hakima

The killer application for the mobile phone has always been messaging whether it is email or texting. It is messaging! There are 215 Billion emails and 500 Billion SMS messages circumnavigating the globe daily. Surely, there is a good reason why things like shopping using the mobile phone, watching movies or getting updates from LOLcats are not killer apps. It is email and texting and it is about getting the critical email content through SMS onto the mobile phone.  Applications like ours allow the Service Providers and Enterprise to deliver the killer app to any of the 3.3 Billion SMS phones not just the 60 Million SmartPhones which only make up 2% of the mobile phone penetration! Enough said, don’t you think? .

…Sue Abu-Hakima